Current policies targeting trans people follow a documented pattern of escalation called trans eliminationism. A new article in the International Journal of Transgender Health identifies three interlocking mechanisms: dehumanisation, artificial threat construction, and biological reductionism. These are not random policy disagreements. They have a recognisable shape, and that shape has appeared before in history.

I have been watching this unfold for years, and one of the hardest things about it is how disorienting the pace feels. A healthcare ban here, a school library restriction there, a redefinition of sex in an executive order, a parliamentary bill quietly introduced while everyone is looking elsewhere. Taken one at a time, each move can be presented as a reasonable response to a specific concern. That is precisely the point. That is how this works.

A newly published article in the International Journal of Transgender Health, by researcher and writer Trish Nolin, does something I think is genuinely useful: it names the pattern. The term Nolin uses is "trans eliminationism," borrowed from political scientist Daniel Goldhagen's concept of eliminationism, which describes ideologies that frame a group as incompatible with society and therefore requiring removal. Nolin applies it to the current moment and argues that what looks like a series of discrete policy debates is better understood as a continuum of escalating harm.

What does the escalation actually look like?

At the less severe end, though still deeply harmful, are social and legal erasure: restricting healthcare access, prohibiting changes to identity documents, removing gender as a protected legal category, banning trans content from schools and libraries, funnelling trans young people into conversion practices. Some of these are no longer theoretical. They are happening now, in the United States at federal and state level, and in New Zealand, where a bill currently before parliament would legislate definitions of woman and man along narrowly biological lines.

Further along the continuum: incarceration and physical violence. Nolin is clear that for the most marginalised trans people, these are already a lived reality, not a future risk. The continuum is not a timeline. Some people are already at its far end.

In the UK, I would add forced detransition to this picture. When puberty blockers are banned, when NHS pathways collapse, when a Supreme Court ruling redefines "woman" for the purposes of the Equality Act in ways that exclude trans women, what happens to the people already mid-transition who cannot access the care they need? They do not simply pause. They are pushed backward, against their will, by policy. That is not a side effect; it is an outcome. And when it is applied systematically, by design, to an entire population, the word "eliminationism" is not an overstatement.

The three mechanisms that drive escalation

Nolin identifies three mechanisms that recur in eliminationist movements, and understanding them is useful because they explain why the pattern is so hard to interrupt in the moment.

The first is dehumanisation. When a group is portrayed as irrational, defective, or morally compromised, moral inhibitions about restricting their rights are lowered. You see this in how trans people's testimony about their own lives is routinely dismissed, how trans women's presence in public spaces is treated as inherently suspect, how trans young people are portrayed as confused or manipulated rather than self-aware.

The second is the artificial construction of a perceived threat. Trans people are framed as dangers to children, to women's safety, to social order. This is the mechanism that makes discriminatory measures feel like protection. It is the engine behind "protecting women's spaces," "safeguarding children from ideology," and all the rest of the language that frames exclusion as care.

The third mechanism Nolin calls biological reductionism: reducing the complexity of sex and gender to a single characteristic and treating it as a person's essential, immutable nature. Once that move is made, trans people become definitionally impossible. The 2025 US executive order defining sex by reproductive cells is one example. The New Zealand bill is another. The UK Supreme Court ruling, though arrived at through a different process, produces a similar effect within equality law. This is not a scientific finding; it is a political choice presented as biological fact, and the distinction matters.

These three mechanisms do not operate in isolation. Biological reductionism is used to cast doubt on trans people's credibility, which enables dehumanisation, which makes the threat construction easier to sustain. Each reinforces the others, and together they make eliminationist policies appear to be reasonable, even reluctant, responses to genuine concerns.

Why history is both sobering and useful here

The sobering part: Nolin is clear that eliminationist projects tend to emerge gradually, normalised one policy, one justification, one compromise at a time. The people living through them often cannot see the shape from inside it. The pace of the current moment, the sheer volume of legislation, the speed at which things that were unthinkable five years ago have become law, is itself part of the mechanism. It is exhausting by design.

The useful part: escalation is not inevitable. Nolin points to the rollback of criminalisation laws and the expansion of legal rights for lesbian and gay people in many jurisdictions as examples of trajectories that were interrupted and reversed. Those reversals were built on sustained resistance and community leadership. They did not happen because the political weather changed on its own. They happened because people named what was happening, organised around that naming, and did not allow the framing of harm as protection to go unchallenged.

The same is possible now. The first step is recognising the shape. What feels like noise has a structure. What feels like a series of separate debates is a single escalating project. And giving it a name, trans eliminationism, is not alarmism. It is accuracy. History earns that word, and so does the present moment.

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Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.